Negotiating Democracy for Haiti.

• Author: Schoultz, Lars
• Position: Plunging into Haiti: Clinton, Aristide, and the Defeat of Diplomacy - Book review

Title: Negotiating Democracy for Haiti

Review by Lars Schoultz

Book Reviewed: Plunging into Haiti: Clinton, Aristide, and the Defeat of Diplomacy. By Ralph Pezzullo. (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 312 pp.

In September 1991 the Haitian military overthrew the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest who a few months earlier had won-and won overwhelmingly-Haiti's first reasonably fair election since the overthrow of the Duvalier dynasty in 1986. To this day Aristide's seven-month tenure remains open to wildly different interpretations, but the international community's condemnation of the coup was unanimous. At Washington's urging the Organization of American States imposed a trade embargo as the first step in a three-year effort to convince the country's new leader, General Raoul Cedras, to reverse the coup and allow Aristide to return to Haiti and resume his presidency.

Ralph Pezzullo's Plunging into Haiti is a chronicle of this effort, told from the perspective of his father, Lawrence Pezzullo, whose career as a Foreign Service Officer had been cut short a dozen years earlier by his decision to oppose the Reagan administration's effort to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista government. Pezzullo's uncommonly acute diplomatic skills had propelled him up the State Department ladder to be ambassador to Uruguay, and then in mid-1979 the Carter administration sent him to Nicaragua just as the Somoza regime was crumbling. There he served with genuine distinction until seven months into the Reagan administration, with which he disagreed over the decision to attempt the overthrow the Sandinista government by creating, training and arming the contras. At that point Pezzullo resigned, wrote a well-regarded book about his experience (At the Fall of Somoza) and became president of Catholic Relief Services. That was what he was doing in early 1993, two months after the Democrats reclaimed the White House, when the State Department invited him back into the fray as President Clinton's special envoy to Haiti. His assignment: get Cedras out and Aristide back in.

From the White House perspective, this was not a "foreign policy" problem. Cedras' 1991 coup had sparked a wave of pro-Artistide rafters, which President Bush sought to stanch by instructing the Coast Guard to intercept the rafters, take them to Guantanamo and then return them to Haiti unless they could demonstrate a well-founded fear of...